


Push Comes to Shove

by akamarykate



Category: Early Edition
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-25
Updated: 2009-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-05 06:19:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/38655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akamarykate/pseuds/akamarykate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I am posting this just past the deadline, hoping to get it in...so rest assured I will be back to edit it tomorrow!!</p></blockquote>





	Push Comes to Shove

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Amilyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amilyn/gifts).



Toni knew, as soon as she walked into McGinty's, that Hobson wasn't there. It was in the friendly, but slightly guilty, look she got from the guy tending bar.

"What his excuse this time?" she asked. She slid onto a bar stool, smoothing the gold dress she would never in a million years admit to buying for just this occasion. Hobson had promised to make up the last missed date with a special dinner, and she was holding him to it. Their on-again, off-again, not-really-even-a-relationship needed a kick start if it was ever going to turn into a relationship at all.

"He's running a little late from his doctor's appointment." The bartender--A.J., she remembered from a couple of similar conversations--held up a wine glass. "You like pinot noir, right?"

"Sure. What kind of doctor?"

A.J. shrugged. "He didn't say."

By rights, Toni thought, it should have been a shrink. But she knew, as did A.J., that Hobson wasn't late for this date because of any doctor's appointment. Too bad she was pretty sure A.J. didn't know the real reason any more than she did.

She wondered what the excuse would be this time. "Had to go help a neighbor," that was the most common. But she could always hope for one of the more obscure ones, the ones that skewed the categories when she tried to graph them on particularly boring stakeouts. "Appointments" was a well-populated category, as was "Traffic Delays". It was a lot more fun when he got creative. The one about him stopping to help the animal wrangler on a commercial shoot in Grant Park find a runaway monkey was her favorite to date.

A.J. put the filled glass in front of her. "Here you go, Detective."

"Detective?" said a voice behind Toni. She jumped, and some of the wine sloshed onto her hand.

Shaking it off, she turned to see a blonde woman in a pastel plaid shirt standing behind her. "You're Toni Brigatti, aren't you?" She had a friendly smile, but there was something in her eyes that was just this side of hungry.

Toni nodded warily. She turned a questioning look on A.J., who mouthed "sorry" and moved down the bar to tend to a pair of new arrivals.

"Oh, it's so lovely to meet you!" the blonde said. She had a few lines around her eyes, and the hair was a decent dye job. She hid it well, but she was old enough to be--oh, yeah. All those pictures scattered around Hobson's loft.

Toni gulped. "Mrs. Hobson. Nice to meet you, too."

"Call me Lois." She held out her hand, and Toni shook it. "Let's go where we can really talk."

Toni gulped down half her wine before she slid into the booth Lois indicated. "Gary's told me so much about you," Lois said, and proceeded to question Toni about her family and career with the tenacity and thoroughness of a seasoned detective.

Toni had never been all that good at interrogations--she didn't have the patience--but she had a damn good poker face, a must in undercover work. So she kept a stiff smile on her face while she parried Lois's questions, giving her just enough to keep her going and to move her away from more delicate topics (former boyfriends, CPD politics, and just what her intentions were toward Gary Hobson, not that Lois put that one to her directly).

All the while, she held down the panic churning inside her--how much was "so much"? Why was Hobson telling his mom about her? And when was Hobson, who seemed to make it his business to save everyone he ran into who had so much as a hangnail, going to come and rescue her from his mother?

She was so busy trying to figure it out, she nearly missed the most important part.

"...and I'm just so glad he's with someone who understands him."

Toni choked, and the wine roughed up her throat. "I--I wouldn't say I understand him." With all the prevaricating Hobson did, there were days she wasn't sure she knew him well enough to pick him out of a line-up.

"Oh, I just meant about the paper, of course," Lois said, her smile warming even more. "It's so much like what you do, though it's a different kind of paperwork." She laughed.

"I...I guess I do understand that," Toni said. She felt a tickling at the back of her brain, the kind that happened when she put clues together in a rush that was part intuition, part logic, and mostly subconscious. There was something here, something she...

...a paper. A newspaper. The _Sun-Times_. Gary always had a copy with him.

"Well, it's kind of like police work, when you think about it," Lois was saying. "Saving lives, rushing in at the last minute--isn't that what the both of you do?"

"I do it because it's my job," Toni said. Her job was to be a detective. To figure things out from clues. To...to put the pieces of puzzles together. So why had it taken her so long to puzzle out Hobson?

Because what she was thinking--that Gary Hobson carried around a newspaper that told him who needed saving--was completely impossible. It had to be.

"And it's Gary's job, too," Lois went on. "Of course, he doesn't get paid, and instead of a dispatch from headquarters, he just reads the..." Lois paused and peered closely at Toni. "He _has_ told you about the paper, hasn't he? He told Erica after they'd only been officially dating for a few weeks, and you've been seeing him since...well, almost since Erica left, haven't you?"

"Off and on," Toni said. More off than on, but Lois didn't seem to know that. Maybe Gary hadn't told his mother all that much about her after all.

Lois, on the other hand, had told Toni everything she needed to know.

*

Hobson apologized all the way to the restaurant, through the wine and appetizer, and into the main course.

"I really am sorry," he said for at least the seventh time as the waiter put their steaks down and left. "There was some kind of obstruction on the tracks, and we sat in that car on the Red Line for over twenty minutes, and this guy next to me just started having heart palpitations and I had to help him--"

Toni held up a hand. "I told you, Hobson, I'm not upset," she said. "I had an interesting talk with your mom."

He waggled his fork between his fingers. "Oh, yeah, Mom, she's...she's great."

_Someone who understands him, Lois had said_, and even though what Toni did understand verged on unbelievable, everything she'd ever observed about Hobson could follow from that one thing. All she had to do was trust that one thing.

It was enough to make a girl dizzy.

"She is," Toni told Hobson. "I like your mom."

He relaxed and finally cut into his steak.

Toni waited until he had chewed, swallowed, and picked up his beer before she asked, "So, when are you going to tell me about the paper?"

She hid her own smirk while emotions warred across his face...anger, shock, and then, weirdly, relief.

Her own expression must have been just as entertaining when Hobson said, "I thought you'd never ask, _detective_." He slapped a slightly worse-for-the-wear copy of the _Sun-Times_ on the table between them and launched into a story that confirmed two things: Toni Brigatti really could put the pieces of a puzzle together, as long as someone's mother laid them out for her, and Hobson was certifiable.

Unless, that was, she counted the evidence laid out in front of her. Which, as a detective, she was pretty much obligated to do. The paper had the next day's date, and an accurate summary of a few things that had happened just today. Still, that didn't mean it was some kind of message from God or the future or...

"Your _cat_?"

"Look, I don't make up the rules. And it's not as if he writes the thing. He just brings it."

"He--okay, forget the cat for a minute. This paper doesn't necessarily prove that you're telling the truth. You could have had it printed somewhere."

"Yeah, I could have. But why would I try to prove something that just makes you think I'm crazy? And it's not like I knew you were going to chat up my mom tonight."

"She did most of the chatting, to tell the truth. And she thought you would have told me a long time ago. Not that I _hadn't_ figured most of it out already."

Hobson snorted. "Mom probably let it slip on purpose."

"On purpose? Why would she do that?" If she had, Toni thought, she'd have to give Lois even more credit. And possibly a job on the force.

"I'd guess it's because she thinks you're trustworthy." Hobson met her gaze dead-on, with an honesty that took her breath away. "And she's right. I'm not always good at trusting people, and I--maybe I needed a--a push."

Toni was pretty sure that what Lois had done was more like a shove off a cliff, but what she didn't know was who it was Lois had intended to shove. "So tell me again how this thing works. How do you know who to save?"

He nodded at the paper. "Stories. That's what I know." Toni started turning pages, while Hobson went on. "Stories about what can happen, and enough clues to change them. Usually. If I'm lucky."

"Like this one?" She turned the paper so he could see the headline on page five. _Pedestrian Killed as Fugitive Flees Police_ "Looks like some guy takes off on a routine traffic stop and swerves into a bunch of shoppers over on Michigan Ave."

Hobson blanched. "That wasn't there before."

"Well it's there now."

"Maybe it was--" He looked at it closely. "Hey, wait. I stopped that guy from wandering into traffic earlier today. He was drunker than a skunk. What's he doing driving?"

In that moment, Toni knew she had a choice. She could play it safe, or she could jump and see what came next. When she watched him read that story, trying frantically to put the pieces together, the last piece of the puzzle that was Gary Hobson clicked into place.

"What he's doing is wasting a perfectly good second chance." Toni dropped the linen napkin on her plate. "What are you waiting for, Hobson? This is going down in half an hour."

He had the manners to stand when she did, though he looked so baffled she nearly laughed. He looked from her to the steak and back.

"You can get a doggie bag. I'm sure Marissa's pooch would be glad to finish it up for you."

"It's not that," he said, though she knew good and well it was at least a little bit that. Gibson's had some of the best steaks in Chicago, which meant it had some of the best steaks in the country. "It's--you're okay with this?"

"That the guy I'm dating gets a newspaper that tells the future from his cat?" She shrugged. "It's the second or third craziest thing I've ever heard, but you're the second or third craziest person I've ever known, so it fits. You _are_ okay with me knowing about it, aren't you?"

"You're still here, so I guess I am." His lopsided grin threatened to break every rule she'd ever set for herself. "Did you just say we're dating?"

Toni turned and started for the door. She might be breaking a lot of her own rules, but she wasn't about to let him see how much this meant to her. "I have a feeling I'm going to regret this, but sure, we're dating. In between your bouts of saving the world."

"You mean Chicago," Hobson said once he'd thrown some bills on the table and caught up with her. He held the door for her, then followed her to the valet station. "There's another guy who's got New York, and--"

"Don't push it, Hobson." Toni stood on tiptoe and kissed him. It wasn't like her; she never kissed first, but it was the only way she could see to shut him up.

"Yes ma'am," he said when she was done, and the breathless note in his voice gave her a satisfying shiver.

"C'mon, Superman." She pushed him toward the car. "Let's see how many people we can save before dessert."

**Author's Note:**

> I am posting this just past the deadline, hoping to get it in...so rest assured I will be back to edit it tomorrow!!


End file.
